Hi Aitch,
I'd love an International Puppy.
I'm not a great programmer (beginner), but BarryK's scripts have very handy comments at strategic places to help those who WANT to learn.

So I've been helping translate Toutou (french Puppy).
Our big probs are UTF-8, localisations and some progs/scripts need ISO-8859-1 encoding for french accents while others need UTF-8 to display french accents correctly.
A simple example : "xmessage" needs iso-8859-1 encoding for french accents while "Xdialog" needs utf-8
and what do you do with a script that contains both ? .. i.e. bootmanager
All binarys need international support compiled in !

Is the kernel international enabled ? The nls_utf_8.ko.gz isn't included in "initrd.gz" nor in Puppy.
The foreign users can't select their correct kbd at Puppy boot time (just typing "puppy pfix=ram" can be hell -> qwerty/qwertz/azerty...)
The specific language xx_xx.uft-8 locale isn't included either, but this is language specific.

On another note, most translators have very limited (non existant) script understanding but are very willing to do the translations.

"esmourguit" uses "po/mo" files that he finds on the net (maybe not the latest version)
But for this to function, the programmers have to do some extra work : use variables in the script and the variables contain the text to translate -> "po" file
They (or the team) are responsible for keeping the "po" file updated for newer versions of the prog !
the translators "translate" the specific language "po" file and submit it for approval.

I probally posted in the wrong topic.. sorry
.. but the heading was exactly what was needed.
.

Mu, I think your Muppy is probably the best production semi international puppy, & was wondering if the work you have already done with German could be a model for others? Have you experience of any accent anomaly as maddox says?

However, I am aware of the French/Russian/Japanese/Hacao_Vietnamese puppies also, as well as the 41 language Puppy, which uses SCIM or SCIM Bridge to get international characters up

Do you know if all language texts will work with SCIM Bridge?
Is this the common UTF8 solution, for accents & boot keyboard availability??

there's a bunch of material that russian puppy team compiled on russification

we even had to walk through almost the whole linux-in-russian-problems ourselves
and have almost 100% russian puppy( puppyrus) based on puppy 3-4

but the first thing is
UTF-8 must be used!!!!
and surprisingly when i booted new unnamed pupplet(made by wow) with ....27 kernel
i saw unicode locales
also it's the first puppy where usb-pen drive with russian filenames with vfat fs( from windoze) is mounted correctly in pcmanfm

the second thing is to make all puppy scripts support gettext
unless we need to rewrite them_________________skype: desafimager

Using gettext or xgettext in the scripts is the only reasonable thing to do. That way, the text to be translated is not completely mixed in with the actual code. This would mean using bash as the script language as it can work with LC variables.
This is very important and critical because most of what makes puppy Puppy, is done with scripts. Still, there are probably many of the commonly-used Puppy binary programs which lack internationalization. Working on adding i18n support to these programs would make a good project for anyone who wants to get their feet wet with C and/or C++ coding, without having to first become a master. Adding the i18n support is not usually too difficult and is completely separate from doing the actual translations. The same is true for using gettext in scripts -adding support for gettext is a separate task from actually translating.

Here's a link to a basic bash/i18n howto:
http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/doc/UNIX/BASH_Guide/localization.html

The "petget manager" and the pet's displayed in the download list needs to be International too (no language barrier if at all possible).
A user might be multi-lingual, and prefer to install a different language pet instead of using the current locale ..
i.e: a french user, but they prefer to install certain pet's in english or another favorite language...
.. This implies a strict compliance on how to create/translate a pet and use the correct encoding for the desired language,
and opening up the petget manager to translated pet's.

We've translated quite a number of "pet's" , so how do we integrate these language/version specific pets ?
A language specific site/link to download pet's might be an idea.

Sorry for such a late post, but has anyone checked out the latest Firefox. Just downloaded the latest version in Thai and installed on 4.21 Final, also installed Thai unicode fonts, and SCIM (SCIM-bridge method) for my wife. Everything seems to be working, Firefox even selects native Thai sites. Just an idea of how to get basic internationalization started.
stray

In the past, filenames have been stored using the local character set. This means that you can't send a file to someone in a different locale or have two files from different character sets on your system at once.

Therefore, there is a general move over to the UTF-8 encoding (which can represent all characters in a single encoding). Many applications (not just ROX ones) now assume that your filenames are UTF-8 and will complain if not. ROX-Filer displays names not in UTF-8 in red.

You can specify a fall-back encoding by setting the CHARSET environment variable. Use something like this to test it (-n forces a new copy of the filer to start):

CHARSET=iso-8859-2 rox -n

A better solution for the future is to convert your filenames to UTF-8 (use the filer's Rename box to convert individual files, or the iconv utility for mass conversion). You can use UTF-8 names from the shell by setting LANG, for example:

If the program already supports translations, you can just copy an existing translation (eg, copy Messages/fr.po as Messages/de.po). Edit the file in your favourite text editor, then run ./dist to generate the output .gmo file and restart the application.